♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous physical therapists on the internet. ♪
- Hi folks. I'm Bob Sharp, physical therapist
- Brad Handy, physical therapist.
- And we are the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our own opinion, of course, Bob
- Dave, we're gonna show you how to use a TENS unit,
or EMS unit, we will explain the difference
between the two, to relieve muscle and joint pain.
And we have a new machine here.
It's called the new Ireliev 8-80.
- Okay.
- It's one of their new machines.
And we're gonna explain to you why it's kind of exciting.
- Actually it's 8 0 8 0, 80 80.
- All right. What did I say? 8-80?
- 8-80. But it's close.
- He's correct. By the way, if you are new to our channel,
please take a second to subscribe to us.
We provide videos on how to stay, healthy fit, pain free
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- Right?
- So...
- If you give it away, it has to be free.
- That's what I was just gonna say.
- If you give it away it is gonna be free.
- We could throw a kink in there.
- But we won't.
- That's right. So come to us. All right.
So why a TENS unit? Why would you use a TENS unit?
And this is kind of exciting too, Brad, because I just
they just came out
with a report and we're gonna go over this.
- Sure.
- I'm gonna go over this report next week. it, 'cause
the details of it are really quite interesting.
- Okay.
- So these are a, a bunch of Australian doctors
a bunch of general practitioners that got together.
- Right.
- And they were telling you what you should do
and shouldn't try for knee arthritis and hip arthritis.
- Oh two biggies.
- Yeah. And, and there's really a lot of things
that are surprising that what you shouldn't do, and
one of 'em is surgery.
- Wait, I'm gonna give that away. You should not?
You should not do surgery on like a meniscus tear unless
it's locking up.
- Okay.
- So, or let's say just your knee pain starts cropping up
for no reason and maybe you're getting older
and the knee cartilage is starting to go,
unless you're going to go to a knee replacement,
but just for arthroscopic surgery.
- Right.
- Nope, no surgery, unless it's actually locking up.
But they do recommend trial of a TENS unit.
- Okay.
- So the studies are showing, there may be some benefit
from using a TENS unit. So this fits right in
with what we're talking about.
- Well, with that. But we, we know the benefits with
TENS units for particularly chronic pain
where people are using synthetic opioids
which can be a, is a major problem
at least in the United States.
If you can get off of those and manage your pain
with a TENS unit, there are no side effects.
- That's right. There's no downside to using it.
There's a couple instances in which you shouldn't use it,
and the booklet goes over that.
- Right.
- So again, the 8-80 unit, this is by Ireliev.
I wanna do... this by the way, was cleared by the FDA.
- Okay.
- So we always wanna make sure that's true.
I wanna just tell real briefly why I picked Ireliev.
I was, I wanted to pick a TENS unit that I thought was
you know, a good unit.
So I went onto the Internet
and I was looking for the one with the best reviews.
- Sure.
And Ireliev was the one. And now since we did a video on it
Ireliev the company, contacted us and said, Hey,
we're coming out with some new products.
- Right.
- I said, that's cool. Let's take a look at 'em.
And so they came out with this one and the,
the biggest advantage of this one is by the way,
what is a TENS unit?
What does TENS stand for?
- Transcutaneous Electrical....
- Electrical, neuro stimulation,
or neuromuscular stimulation.
- Neuro neuromuscular. It's a mouthful.
- Yeah. And the what, I'm just gonna point out. One of the
big advantages of this unit is it
doesn't have batteries. You can recharge it.
- Right.
- Brad and I have been around for 150 years. And so we
we saw when the TENS units first came out and oh my
- God, we always had to change the batteries.
- The pads were so much harder to use. Remember,
we had to tape 'em in place, right?
- Yeah. I mean, yeah.
- You had to put gel down.
- Now. Now you're going back, Bob. Yeah. And dating us.
- And those units were thousands of dollars.
- Yeah.
- And you know, this one is $129.95 and that
is hard to believe
- And that includes the wires and the pads and, you know
- Yeah. Includes, yeah, two leads. It's got smaller pads.
I know I'm jumping around a little bit here.
We've got smaller pads and we got the larger pads.
- Right.
- I've got the smaller pads on and Brad's hooked up
to one of the larger ones here. And they show
the different ways where you can put it
on the different parts of your body to help,
you know, different types of pain.
- Right.
- So let's, let's just show real quickly, Brad,
with my diagram here, I'm really proud of this.
- Yeah. You are an artist, Bob.
If, if this doesn't go well for us, we're going to get it.
You can get into the art field then I'll
get into the singing. Ah, that's killing.
- So basically let's say you hit your thumb.
What happens is the, the thumb, you know
through the neural pathways sends the message
of pain right up into your brain.
You're going, "Ow, that hurts."
- Right.
- So what happens with the TENS unit actually
stimulates some smaller nerves that cuts
off the pain pathway right here.
Let's say we have it hooked up right here.
Or we could have it hooked up right here.
- This is that gate. - This is the gating theory
or gate theory.
That's cutting off the pain pathway.
And what happens then?
- Yeah. Look at that.
Get rid of that smile.
Turn your frown upside down.
- There we go.
- And he's smiling because the pain has gone away.
- Right.
- The other thing it does, it actually
stimulates the natural opioids.
- Sure.
- In your body, the, the endorphins.
- Right.
- The endogenous opioids.
- Well, you've been doing your homework.
- I've been doing my homework. So that also
puts a smile on you. So you....
- Isn't that true even after you turn this off,
those continue to...
- Very good point.
- Actively work as a pain control.
- Which by the way, there is a point of contention here
that they recommend and they have the timer on this.
This has a timer. It can go up to 60 minutes
and they recommend not to you know, do more
than 60 minutes at a time.
- Sure.
But I mean, I was taught and I just read it recently
that you could keep it on all day.
- Okay.
- So I think, Brad and I kind of discussed it
where you said, well you could put it on for 60 minutes,
take it off for a while, and then do another 60 minutes.
- Right. Right.
- So that would work out really good.
- Right. So, you know, things that things change
and evolve and grow over time and I think this
may be just another one in regards to TENS units.
- So in, in setting this thing up, by the way
it's got a nice little clip on there that you can clip
onto your belt and you can put it in your pocket.
- Sure.
- So it's, it's got the two leads and then it's got
the front panel here and it's got the, the
the screen, which I guess they've made that bigger, too.
[Brad]- Yeah. So you as get you older, you can.
- Yeah.
- Yeah. The vision thing
- When the peepers are going out
you gotta be able to make sure that you can see things.
So rather than try to show you on the machine
how to run this, I actually drew a picture here of, so this
this part here is the bottom part of the unit.
And this part here is what you'll see on the screen.
- Sure.
Okay.
- So can I have the unit first, Brad?
[Brad]- Yeah.
- I'll disconnect you.
So I'm gonna go ahead.
So there's basically two holes on the top here.
That's where the leads go in. This one's channel
one, on the left side.
- Right.
- And then one on the right is channel two.
So I'm gonna go ahead and hook up channel one.
[Brad]- You just simply push it in this, in the socket.
It's easy.
- Yeah. What I would recommend, by the way, I would put
I would put the pads in place, and a lot of times
you wanna maybe use soap and water and
you wanna make sure there's no hair there.
[Brad]- Right.
- But you're gonna clean it off. And then I put
the pads in place, attach the leads,
and then go ahead and attach the lead to the machine.
Cause if you try to put the pads
and then try to attach the leads afterwards,
[Brad]- Right.
- It gets really difficult to do.
I hope I'm clear as mud on that one.
- So, so this is obviously you've identified where
you want to put the leads and, and Bob's jumped.
We, we kind of went over that.
- I just did it here because it's an easy place to show,
but...
- Sure.
- But you know, I could do a tennis elbow here.
- Right.
- That'd be golfer's elbow here on the inside here, so.
- Right.
- All right, so the first thing I'm doing
here's the control buttons below,
I'm gonna push on the, on button.
So you wanna push show me where the
on button is, Brad, on here.
- Oh, right, right there.
- Yeah.
- Plus.
- Okay.
- Plus
- You hold it down for like three seconds.
And when that happens you're gonna get this
screen right here. And it's gonna say program intensity,
minutes, and it's got, it's gonna be, have one of these one
one or the other of these. Right now, mine says TENS unit.
So if I push Mode which I do right now,
this TENS unit starts flashing.
And if I push On or Off it'll
either toggle to the EMS or back to the TENS unit again.
- Sure.
- So, so right now I've got TENS unit.
I'm gonna leave it on the TENS unit.
The EMS is gone here.
We'll talk about the EMS in just a little bit.
- Sure.
- So the next time I'm gonna go ahead and push Mode again.
Okay. And when I push mode again, now Program is flashing.
- Right.
- And I'm gonna pick one through six of the TENS units
and the, and it's just real.
Oh no, I'm sorry, there's one through eight.
- Right.
- There's eight different modes for TENS.
- I was gonna correct you on that, Bob.
- Oh, thank you.
- I'm right on the ball.
- One through seven is for pain relief.
- Okay.
- They're just different modes.
I found basically one was a little bit, you know, easier on
me than, than number seven.
- It's more of a constant, consistent buzz kind
of a feeling.
- Right. And number eight was a, that was like
remember what the old TENS was
where it was kind of that sharp burst of pain.
- Yeah.
- So these are things that you kind of play
with and get a feel for this.
- Yeah. So I would probably start maybe on number one, P-one
if I were you and then I'm gonna hit mode again
and that locks it in. So now it's gonna then
go down to minutes and the same thing you
can set the minutes between one and 20 or, you know,
one and 60, I believe. Let me see.
Yeah, it'll go all the way up to 60.
- Sure. So yeah. You know, one minute to typically, yeah.
Twenty's a good way to start.
- I take that back, it goes 5, 10, 15.
I think it goes in five minute increments.
- Okay.
- So, I hit mode again and now I'm ready to go.
So now I'm gonna hit channel one.
I hit channel one and I'm gonna go ahead
and turn my intensity up.
Now what I'm gonna recommend on this, and Brad
and I just experienced this. You push one and you wait
a little bit because it has to go through the whole cycle
before you feel it.
- And that cycle may take between five and ten seconds.
- Yeah. So I don't really feel much on that now.
So I'll go to two. Again, I'm on a lower setting. Oh, now
starting to feel it.
- Right. Usually you'll start to feel
a little tingly sensation.
- Yeah.
- So two is just the intensity we're talking about.
Not the program.
- Yep. So I'm going, I'm hitting number one here.
Now you can see, see how my finger curled up there?
That actually is, I'm not doing that.
The machine is doing that
- But you can clearly feel it.
- Yeah. This is, this is comfortable. This is,
this isn't something that, you know, I, you know
would be uncomfortable.
- Right.
- So now as I go up to six, seven, now it,
now you see how it's whoa.
- Right? So...
- That would not be comfortable.
- This is one thing I don't, we didn't really explain
when you get the sensation from the TENS unit.
Also what goes along with that
with the human body, is muscles contract as a response
to electrical current going through your body.
This is a very small amount of current
but it's enough to get the muscles to contract.
So you're going to not put the current so high
that you get a strong contraction, unless, you know
if you were trying some other goals.
- Right.
- Which we'll get into in another video you might do that
in those situations. But not for...
- You wanna turn yours up, Brad? It's on channel two now
- So here we got channel... Now this, you would not
normally use two people...
- People, right.
- But, for our demonstration, we don't have
- Show them the bigger pad.
- Right.
- You probably can't see, can you?
- So here, you know, I actually have a wound today.
You know, I got a little pain from this little rug rash
I actually got mountain biking.
- And you would not put this over a wound, by the way.
Right. Always on healthy, skin. So I've got it above there.
And you're all set with me here, Bob?
- Yep.
- Hit channel two.
- So I hit channel two on on the button there
on the panel and and now Brad's going up and
he's working his way up and he is gonna feel,
what number are you at? Oh, you, you went up
to seven last time. I wouldn't go any higher than that.
Well, oh, you're on channel one.
- Right? I was playing with it, Bob.
- Well now, you're hitting mine
- Yeah. Turned it up on him.
- Thanks a lot.
- I wanna put yours up.
- Oh, there we go.
- There we go.
- So...
- Take that, Brad.
- You can go a little more. Woo. There we go.
And that's, that's not uncomfortable though
but although it is stimulating, you can see.
- Yeah.
- Which brings us to the second setting.
So you can actually go to toggle, I almost dropped it.
- Oh, Bob.
- Here, you hold it. Don't turn it up.
- Relax.
- And you turn, you toggle and you go to EMS
and that's electrical muscle stimulation.
We're kind of running out of time here
but that's to strengthen weaker muscles.
As long as your peripheral nervous system is intact yet.
Like if you had a stroke or a spinal cord injury,
multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, even healthy people
you can actually stimulate the muscle.
So it does both.
- It does...
- Right. So...
- Do we wanna mention the precautions as far as...
- They've got a whole book full
of precautions and the big one we always worry
about is a pacemaker and pregnant women.
And don't put it over the carotid sinuses and
- Right.
- Don't put it over your eyes.
- Right.
- So, alright. We're taking way too long here.